(no subject)
Yesterday was much travel. First, to Covent Garden, an enclosed market with oodles of shops. It was early enough that it wasn't mobbed yet; I did some fun candid photography. We started working our way up toward our meetingplace with frankie_ecap, and realized we had fifteen minutes to spare so we checked out the British Museum. Holy cow, but that's a great museum. I really appreciate that gov't-owned museums in the city are free- it made for easier choices occasionally. d. wrote up his side of that visit; while he was checking out the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles, I wandered through the Reading Room and main lobby, which is terrifically pretty. We determined that we'd come back in the morning to get tix for the Michaelangelo sketches exhibit, and darted out the door to meet Frankie.
The three of us ate at a great indian buffet Frankie knew about, the best I've had in ages. Yum. I am glad we had to catch a train, or I'd still be eating now...
Then, to the trains out to Bletchley Park, which was vaguely complicated and roughly an hour out of the city. All the better for more catching up with Frankie. (It's a neat thing to get to meet f/t/f with an LJ friend- my favourite quote from Frankie was along the lines of "How did you two meet? I know I've read it, but I want to hear it too.")
At our train stop, there was a convenient sign ("Bletchley Park: behind the Discount Rent-a-Car") which led to a tree-lined path up to a guard-house and a bunch of ugly concrete buildings... Overall: the museum portions were sprawling, widely varying in informational quality, and largely staffed by volunteers who seemed very keen on their jobs. The encoding/decoding machines were super. Some of the looked like they were modeled on Underwood typewriters, but with a second keyboard under a panel, and a set of bulbs for readouts on the top. The code-breaking systems were considerably bigger, of course, and looked like jerry-rigged computers. I'll have photos to post, but after I get home.
We lucked into a guided tour, which took us to the huts where Turing & Co. worked, the mansion which the site was based around, and various grounds. One unexpected bit: there is a running post-office on site, with all sorts of connections to the stamp-collecting crowd. During the war, this post-office handled mail for the 10,000 code-breakers who lived there; now, it's manned mostly by volunteers who do things like send special stamp collections unsolicted to the Queen.
We got to see a reconstruction of Colossus, but just barely. They were closing up shop just as we got there. I got all of three photos, and didn't get to look around much. The machinery, which operated from punch-tape, had the theoretical data-throughput of some ten-thousand characters a second (6-bits I believe), though anything faster than a few thousand caused the paper to shred.
Another surprise was learning that the Germans hadn't developed Enigma for the war. They bought it on the open market. It was the most automatic encrypion system available, and had been designed by Swedes in the 1920s for commercial encryption. So there was a fair bit of commercial use before WWII, of course with lower-grade encryption (the commercial version used three rotors, each which remapped letters once. The first wartime version used 5 or 6 rotors at a time.)
There was a pretty good computer museum back at the main visitor hall, where I got to noodle around briefly with working Amstrad, Vic20, ZX-80, and Mac Classics.
Yay, old-sk00l geekery. This place seemed a geek haven. There were halls reserved for a local model-boat club, a model train club, something having to do with old cinema, the philatists of course, and general war-preservation collections as well.
We caught the train back, and went to dinner at the pub below our hotel. Which was reasonably good; they had Guinness on tap, and I had a tasty salmon and spinich over vegetables and a sort of cream sauce, and d. had fish and chips.
The three of us ate at a great indian buffet Frankie knew about, the best I've had in ages. Yum. I am glad we had to catch a train, or I'd still be eating now...
Then, to the trains out to Bletchley Park, which was vaguely complicated and roughly an hour out of the city. All the better for more catching up with Frankie. (It's a neat thing to get to meet f/t/f with an LJ friend- my favourite quote from Frankie was along the lines of "How did you two meet? I know I've read it, but I want to hear it too.")
At our train stop, there was a convenient sign ("Bletchley Park: behind the Discount Rent-a-Car") which led to a tree-lined path up to a guard-house and a bunch of ugly concrete buildings... Overall: the museum portions were sprawling, widely varying in informational quality, and largely staffed by volunteers who seemed very keen on their jobs. The encoding/decoding machines were super. Some of the looked like they were modeled on Underwood typewriters, but with a second keyboard under a panel, and a set of bulbs for readouts on the top. The code-breaking systems were considerably bigger, of course, and looked like jerry-rigged computers. I'll have photos to post, but after I get home.
We lucked into a guided tour, which took us to the huts where Turing & Co. worked, the mansion which the site was based around, and various grounds. One unexpected bit: there is a running post-office on site, with all sorts of connections to the stamp-collecting crowd. During the war, this post-office handled mail for the 10,000 code-breakers who lived there; now, it's manned mostly by volunteers who do things like send special stamp collections unsolicted to the Queen.
We got to see a reconstruction of Colossus, but just barely. They were closing up shop just as we got there. I got all of three photos, and didn't get to look around much. The machinery, which operated from punch-tape, had the theoretical data-throughput of some ten-thousand characters a second (6-bits I believe), though anything faster than a few thousand caused the paper to shred.
Another surprise was learning that the Germans hadn't developed Enigma for the war. They bought it on the open market. It was the most automatic encrypion system available, and had been designed by Swedes in the 1920s for commercial encryption. So there was a fair bit of commercial use before WWII, of course with lower-grade encryption (the commercial version used three rotors, each which remapped letters once. The first wartime version used 5 or 6 rotors at a time.)
There was a pretty good computer museum back at the main visitor hall, where I got to noodle around briefly with working Amstrad, Vic20, ZX-80, and Mac Classics.
Yay, old-sk00l geekery. This place seemed a geek haven. There were halls reserved for a local model-boat club, a model train club, something having to do with old cinema, the philatists of course, and general war-preservation collections as well.
We caught the train back, and went to dinner at the pub below our hotel. Which was reasonably good; they had Guinness on tap, and I had a tasty salmon and spinich over vegetables and a sort of cream sauce, and d. had fish and chips.